Xbox 360 Elite confirmed!

It's nice to see that the black Xbox 360 Elite is finally confirmed!

Extreme Multiprogramming

I just found these notes from some sort of lecture on multiprocessing. I'm most interested in the notes about the Cell and of course the 360!

The Xbox 360 Dissected

I just found this page which I'm reading for breakfast. It should bring me up to date on the 360 hardware.

Edit: I found out that it was a bit outdated after I wrote this, but it was interesting reading none the less.

I'm currently trying to come up with the core engine design for the current game I'm working on with a friend of mine. Multithreading is the way to go if you've got processing needs - and even though our first game is a sprite based arcade game, it doesn't hurt to plan ahead. If all goes well we're planning on using the same core engine for other games, so it has to be able to scale up.

Check this out:
Coding For Multiple Cores on Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows

XNA and Video Safe Area

I just realized something. Coding for the 360 and PC at the same time isn't only sweet - as I've just realized when remembering that there's something called safe area in TV editing. Here's a simple way to display these areas - and now to find a good way to handle them both on PCs and TVs. I guess I'll bring the notion of safe areas into my base canvas class, which is a wrapper class around the direct3d device I'm planning on designing to reduce the amount of re-coding basic gfx stuff.

360 Controller Blues

I was really excited when I got to borrow a 360 for xmas - at last could I try some XNA coding with the controller - but helas. The official drivers wouldn't install and the unofficial drivers i found wouldn't recognize the device. It is a wireless controller with a USB cable connected and I expect this to be the problem with the unofficial drivers. The cable might only be to recharge the batteries/provide power - but it doesn't change the fact that the official drivers wouldn't install on neither my sister's nor my system!